The same police recording that Mayor Dwaine Caraway fought bitterly to suppress actually makes him sound like a concerned husband -- calm, cool and collected -- trying to protect the good name of his wife, state Rep. Barbara Mallory Caraway.

On the recording -- which follows, along with the police investigative reports -- Caraway tells police detectives that his wife, who he says may have a "chemical imbalance," slipped a knife through the crack in a door he was holding against her in attempt to avoid a violent confrontation.

It's an unexpected outcome to a long-running salacious public scandal. City officials only released the recording and associated documents after the mayor lost a court battle to have them suppressed.

During the weeks Caraway fought his losing battle, rumors about the contents of the recording hit the gossip stratosphere. Had he allowed the tapes to be released when reporters first sought them, Caraway would have come across as an abused husband (according to his own version of things), trapped in a deeply dysfunctional marriage he wants to escape.

Rep. Caraway did not speak to police and has not spoken publicly about these events, so her side of the story remains unknown. The Observer left messages for her this morning at her home, at her Austin office and at her Dallas office.

In listening to the recording and reading the associated documents, the thing to keep in mind is that the mayor apparently has never managed to tell the truth about the incident to reporters or on the stand in yesterday's court proceeding.

On the recording, the mayor says the original cause of the incident was her desire to throw away some aprons belonging to the mayor -- not the story he told reporters, when he said two friends named Arthur and Archie had caused a rumpus, and not the story he told in court, when he said the incident started when his wife became angry about a football watching party.

Now it's about aprons.

[Editor's note: The one beep you hear on the tape is a phone number that's given out.]